Sunday, January 21, 2007

The iPod Phone

Just as I predicted before, it was inevitable that the iPod was going to be integrated with a phone in one device. The new device is relatively big, expensive, and limited to 8 Mb memory. With time, however, the size will shrink and the price will come down and the memory will reach 30 G and beyond.
I recently replaced my old T3 Palm PDA with a new Palm TX device, which has WiFi and Bluetooth. Now I can surf the internet with my new Palm, which is a big plus, but I lost some functionality as compared to the old T3 device. The Palm TX has smaller dynamic memory, which I don't understand why. Due to this limitation in dynamic memory, I can't run some of the older applications that used to run fine with the T3 PDA, such as PalmPDF reader and ABC-Morse. The PalmPDF reader fails to open big PDF documents, which makes it useless on the new PDA, while the ABC-Morse application cannot sound the Morse characters smoothly anymore, probably due to this limitation in dynamic memory. Merely adding WiFi function into the PDA made me lose other PDA functions that ran fine on the old PDA. This is exactly what I was afraid of when they integrate more functions into the old plain vanilla PDA , such as phone or WiFi.
Now I wonder what will we lose in the iPod phone besides memory. Don't get me wrong, I am not suggesting they stop the integration effort, because eventually it will work right. All what I am saying is that there is a price for this integration. I could be nostalgic defending the way things used to be, but right now a plain PDA still works better than a PDA than a phone PDA, and a plain iPod is most likely going to work better than a phone iPod. This might change in the future, but until then I will continue to be nostalgic. What do you think?